Why you should read the book Before the Lights Go Out

Our power system faces hard challenges no matter what we do about the climate.

In the very first pages of her book, Before the Lights Go Out, Maggie Koerth-Baker blows my mind. Not in the sense of "Wow, I never knew that!" (although I certainly thought that throughout the book), but more like "Wow, I never thought of it that way!" I’m referring to the revelation that the reasons for pursuing alternative energy don’t have to be focused on climate change. Instead, many Americans care more about energy security, conservation, or simple nationalism. This sets the tone for the whole book: let’s skip the reasons and just focus on the solutions and hard choices that need to be made.

Hard choices, indeed. This isn’t a book proclaiming that the hydrogen economy or nuclear fusion or something else (pick your dream energy source/carrier) will save us all. Koerth-Baker is optimistic, but realistic: we can do this, but there aren’t any easy solutions, and it’s probably going to be expensive. This isn’t about driving a hybrid or changing your lightbulbs—not that those aren’t good things to do—but rather, as she puts it, "about the inconvenient complications, unforeseen side effects, and less-than-perfect solutions."

The book is a fast and easy read (in the good sense). If you're familiar with Koerth-Baker’s work as the science editor at BoingBoing, you know that she does a great job breaking down complicated concepts while keeping them interesting. This carries over to the book, and it reads almost like a long-form blog post, which is a good thing. Instead of links, every chapter holds a Neal-Stephenson-esque level of footnotes—52 pages of them (compared to just over 200 pages of primary content).

As the title subtly suggests, this book focuses mostly on electricity, rather than transportation fuels or other energy sectors. This isn’t because those other areas aren’t interesting, but simply because electrical generation makes up the biggest single portion of energy use and emissions.

Starting with the first stumbling attempts at electricity generation and the electrical grid in New York and Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1882, Koerth-Baker explains how we got here, and what "here" is: an electrical grid with waste and inefficiencies at both the generation and consumption ends, one that requires constant monitoring to make sure there isn’t too much or too little electricity running through our wires.

The grid is sort of like the Matrix: all around us, affecting everything we do without us usually noticing, and only a few people really understand it. Unlike the Matrix, however, which was created by advanced artificial intelligences, the grid has come together piece-by-piece over the last 100+ years. (Things would probably by easier if it had been the former, though.) Koerth-Baker does a great job demystifying the grid, as well as explaining the difficulties in bringing large amounts of electrical power from renewables to our current grid.

To explain all these things, she takes us across the United States, meeting people like the owner of an extremely energy-efficient home in Urbana, Illinois—so efficient, in fact, that it can be heated by a single candle in the fall—and the director of a electrical grid control center in Houston, Texas. We also travel to the farm town of Medelia, Minnesota, where the leader of a local nonprofit is trying to improve soil and water quality by getting farmers to grow crops other than corn and soy—crops that can be converted to biofuels to sell locally. These experiences drive home the message that we can start making energy changes now, rather than waiting on some miracle solution.

There are a couple minor issues I must bring up, even if I’m nitpicking. For one, Koerth-Baker insists that the metric prefix "giga" (as in "gigawatt," one billion watts) is pronounced with a soft 'g,' as in "jigawatt." Apparently, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (back when it was just the National Bureau of Standards) formalized this version, but I’ve never heard it said this way in practice, Back to the Future notwithstanding. Like I said, nitpicking (and I’m only half serious).

I do have one slightly more substantive criticism, although it is still minor. When talking about biofuel made from grass, she says that researchers are working on making it compatible with cars. However, this sentence encapsulates a big problem that the engine and combustion community is dealing with right now. Without getting into this issue too deeply, the problem is solvable, but there is a good amount of work needed to both understand the properties of the biofuels and to redesign existing engines (or new engines altogether) that can run on varying fuels.

In all, this is a great book, and one I recommend that pretty much everyone should read. We interact with electricity and energy every day, even if it has become invisible. Energy change is going to happen, and the change might be easier if we all understand the issues and decisions that need to be made.

103 Reader Comments

I'm annoyed to have to post this, as I really want to delve right in and read this book, your article has certainly done a great job in reccommending it. I'm going to be seen as a complete ass for saying this too, but:

The Kindle version costs more than the Hardback. No sale for me. It's annoying as that is the only thing that is stopping me from getting this. I just can't justify myself.

Will still get the sample, and see if that persuades me enough. I'm just a bit sour from that fact though.

I'm annoyed to have to post this, as I really want to delve right in and read this book, your article has certainly done a great job in reccommending it. I'm going to be seen as a complete ass for saying this too, but:

The Kindle version costs more than the Hardback. No sale for me. It's annoying as that is the only thing that is stopping me from getting this. I just can't justify myself

I won't be buying this book if the opening premise is that the US electric grid is in crisis. This Ars article surely didn't give any justification for that. Must be sensationalism for the purpose of selling books. I've been an engineer in the US electric business for 20 years. It's not in crisis.

I won't be buying this book if the opening premise is that the US electric grid is in crisis. This Ars article surely didn't give any justification for that. Must be sensationalism for the purpose of selling books. I've been an engineer in the US electric business for 20 years. It's not in crisis.

I think the crisis is that power costs are going up and up. If you work in the electric business I guess it's more of a windfall then a crisis.

The solution to the crisis is to do something about the science deniers. The science deniers are spending big bucks on misinformation. People are being seduced by smooth liars with lies that sound compelling to an untrained ear.

It's much harder to counter simple, effective lies with the intricacies of reality.

I’m referring to the revelation that the reasons for pursuing alternative energy don’t have to be focused on climate change. Instead, many Americans care more about energy security, conservation, or simple nationalism. This sets the tone for the whole book: let’s skip the reasons and just focus on the solutions and hard choices that need to be made.

THIS. I am far more concerned about energy security than climate change. I understand (and agree!) that the environment needs to be a factor in any choices we make. However, there are other reasons for pursuing alternative energies and new energy technologies.

The solution to the crisis is to do something about the science deniers. The science deniers are spending big bucks on misinformation. People are being seduced by smooth liars with lies that sound compelling to an untrained ear.

It's much harder to counter simple, effective lies with the intricacies of reality.

Or maybe the Obama administration could devote more funds to modernizing the grid instead of pouring huge amounts of money into the Solyndra's and Fiskers of the world and into not ready for prime time alternative fuels.

Sure it's not nearly as sexy as OMG solar, wind and bio-fuels but it would probably net more electricity than the others put together.

But since Obama wants to take credit for more visible alternatives and to appease the enviro - weenies it won't happen.

The solution to the crisis is to do something about the science deniers.

Yes, we should round up everyone who doesn't believe that scientists couldn't possibly be biased or inaccurate and put them into special camps. Scientific consensus is never wrong, particularly not among people whose entire field and worldview is built upon something so important that it attracts only people of pure and unclouded ideology. So many prominent climate scientists are so convinced of their conclusions that they've been showing up to political demonstrations and rallies pretty much forever, and they've been saying for literally decades that the science is completely settled--so they just have to be right. There's zero chance that it's the ideology driving the science, rather than the other way around, because that never happens:

Perhaps after we round up all the unbelievers holding us back, we could then subsidize companies to create ways we can convert them into biofuel, because money spent subsidizing green energy technology could never be a waste of limited resources or anything. Any green is good green, no matter how much it costs or how little return on investment it provides.

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It's much harder to counter simple, effective lies with the intricacies of reality.

Yes, indeed it is my friend; indeed it is. The world is a complicated place. Economies, societies, cultures--all very complicated things, difficult to keep pointed forward toward human progress as we worry about backsliding down into less liberty and diminished equality. It's a good thing the looming global warming and energy crises are so pressing that we can just ignore all that and devote all of our efforts and resources toward one thing, opportunity costs be damned.

[/sarcasm off]

I'm all for modernizing the grid and our power generation and distribution infrastructure, but the elephant in the room remains the nuclear question. Nuclear and natural gas seem like necessary investments in the near term. However, environmentalists have been completely opposed to more nuclear power for so long, and have been poisoning public opinion about it for so long, that I worry we're just going to remain frozen with near-inaction. Likewise with natural gas and the controversies over fracking. What does this book have to say and/or advocate regarding more nuclear capacity? Likewise with natural gas?

We can move away from coal and oil today, but it's the environmentalists who refuse to let us. All they focus on is carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade to the exclusion of allowing progress to be made in other ways by supporting the alternatives available now.

killing_time wrote:

small oversight,forgot to end article with Reading Rainbow end jingle.

Or maybe the Obama administration could devote more funds to modernizing the grid instead of pouring huge amounts of money into the Solyndra's and Fiskers of the world and into not ready for prime time alternative fuels.

Sure it's not nearly as sexy as OMG solar, wind and bio-fuels but it would probably net more electricity than the others put together.

But since Obama wants to take credit for more visible alternatives and to appease the enviro - weenies it won't happen.

Bingo. We have limited resources, and we are wasting them. We could accomplish many great things today to build a cleaner, greener, more energy-conscious future--but the left is preventing us by tilting at windmills and insisting on billion-dollar-boondoggles while ignoring very real and politically feasible advances to be made. They are ideologically wedded to pricing carbon and funding pie-in-the-sky pipe dreams, and have complete tunnel vision about all other paths toward solving our problems.

And then they obstruct everything else that could be useful in the meantime.

Did they ever think, for example, that instead of opposing oil pipelines across the midwest they might find that an infrastructure buildout for moving oil today might be useful in the future for moving water, when our water needs there are more severe? If climate change and water usage predictions are accurate, moving water through those pipes might be more lucrative 50 years from now than moving oil through them.

Think about the future, and give us every option to get through it intact. Enviro-nuts refuse to.

There is one serious problem with the book as it's described in the article.

Yes, there's a problem with fossil fuels, whether from global warming, national security, or supply. But when it comes to electricity, there is an abundant and dependable source available now that doesn't require us to accept a reduced supply or reduced reliability. Nuclear power. Especially with the Thorium breeder, which is a solved problem.

So to say we're going to face tough choices when the answer is a no-brainer seems mistaken.

The book does not push renewable only. In fact, it specifically recognizes that we are going to keep burning coal, natural gas, and oil in the near future. One section of the book specifically deals with nuclear and carbon capture and storage with regards to natural gas and coal ("clean coal").

I won't be buying this book if the opening premise is that the US electric grid is in crisis. This Ars article surely didn't give any justification for that. Must be sensationalism for the purpose of selling books. I've been an engineer in the US electric business for 20 years. It's not in crisis.

Depends on how you interpret the term "crisis". And if you don't think that the US grid is in need of upgrades and a co-ordinated national policy about such upgrades, I'd suggest reading the DoE report "Keeping the Lights On" (which I suspect served as the 'inspiration' for the title of this book as reported in this thinly veiled ad for a friend).

It is, in fact, pronounced with a soft g sound, as per the rules of English.

ga, go, and gu use hard g, ge and gi (and gy) use soft g.

By the same token, ca, co, and cu use the hard c sound, while ce and ci (and cy) use the soft c sound.

The problem you've described arises because English isn't especially well standardized, being a bastardization of pretty much every language out there. There are some words wherein ge and gi are pronounced with a hard g sound, like get and giddy, but there are far more words, like gel, gem, geriatric, gist, gigantic, gigolo, and so forth, which conform properly to the rule. Most exceptions will be because the root word in question is from a different language than the one the rule came from.

Therefore, both words in "Jumpin' Gigawatts!" are pronounced with the same sound. The Doc is right.

If you have an unfamiliar word and want to be sure the reader pronounces a hard g before an e or i, use gh, such as ghigawatts (which should probably be spelled ghiggawatts to show the i is short anyway).

Or maybe the Obama administration could devote more funds to modernizing the grid instead of pouring huge amounts of money into the Solyndra's and Fiskers of the world and into not ready for prime time alternative fuels.

Sure it's not nearly as sexy as OMG solar, wind and bio-fuels but it would probably net more electricity than the others put together.

But since Obama wants to take credit for more visible alternatives and to appease the enviro - weenies it won't happen.

This argument is beyond stupid. The entire point of the government funding R&D like this is to get jobs in the US producing renewable energy. Retards, such as yourself, will only note the failures and fail to notice the successes. This is part of the problem - success is far less reported than failure, especially by people with an agenda like yourself.

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Yes, we should round up everyone who doesn't believe that scientists couldn't possibly be biased or inaccurate and put them into special camps. Scientific consensus is never wrong, particularly not among people whose entire field and worldview is built upon something so important that it attracts only people of pure and unclouded ideology. So many prominent climate scientists are so convinced of their conclusions that they've been showing up to political demonstrations and rallies pretty much forever, and they've been saying for literally decades that the science is completely settled--so they just have to be right. There's zero chance that it's the ideology driving the science, rather than the other way around, because that never happens:

The problem is that you have to be insane to believe that climate change isn't occuring. The US Military, which is hardly a liberal, green organization, considers climate change and peak oil to be enormous security concerns.

I'm sorry that you are unable to cope with reality. The science has been settled for decades and has been blindingly obvious for a long time, because the greenhouse effect is simple science. You can verify it for yourself if you'd like. Take two plastic containers, fill one of them with pure air, and then spike the other with higher levels of greenhouse gases as represent the future atmospheric composition. Set them out and measure their temperature over time. Which do you think will be warmer? Gee, I wonder. The fact that some gasses trap heat better than others is not controversial and is basic physics.

The only reason this is controversial is the same as with evolution: some folk feel like they have a lot to lose. It is the same as tobacco companies suppressing evidence that smoking causes cancer.

You are a bad person if you are unable to accept reality.

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Perhaps after we round up all the unbelievers holding us back, we could then subsidize companies to create ways we can convert them into biofuel, because money spent subsidizing green energy technology could never be a waste of limited resources or anything. Any green is good green, no matter how much it costs or how little return on investment it provides.

The more we do research the cheaper it becomes. The price of PVs has been falling relative to power output for some time now.

Though I am personally for taking everyone who denied climate change, and their children, and their children's children, and in a hundred years when Florida has flooded give their land to all the refugees and cut them up and feed them to the hungry.

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I'm all for modernizing the grid and our power generation and distribution infrastructure, but the elephant in the room remains the nuclear question. Nuclear and natural gas seem like necessary investments in the near term. However, environmentalists have been completely opposed to more nuclear power for so long, and have been poisoning public opinion about it for so long, that I worry we're just going to remain frozen with near-inaction. Likewise with natural gas and the controversies over fracking. What does this book have to say and/or advocate regarding more nuclear capacity? Likewise with natural gas?

Its not environmentalists in general - part of the problem is, simply put, that the public is far more likely to notice a few enormous disasters (TMI, Chernobyl, the latest debacle in Japan) than the thousands of people who die to King Coal every year.

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We can move away from coal and oil today, but it's the environmentalists who refuse to let us. All they focus on is carbon taxes and/or cap-and-trade to the exclusion of allowing progress to be made in other ways by supporting the alternatives available now.

Coal will be moved away from if we force it to pay its fair share for the environmental contamination it causes.

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Did they ever think, for example, that instead of opposing oil pipelines across the midwest they might find that an infrastructure buildout for moving oil today might be useful in the future for moving water, when our water needs there are more severe? If climate change and water usage predictions are accurate, moving water through those pipes might be more lucrative 50 years from now than moving oil through them.

Moving water long distances is always going to be a mistake. Its a mistake in LA, it will be a mistake in the future. The correct thing to do is to move the people.

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Yes, there's a problem with fossil fuels, whether from global warming, national security, or supply. But when it comes to electricity, there is an abundant and dependable source available now that doesn't require us to accept a reduced supply or reduced reliability. Nuclear power. Especially with the Thorium breeder, which is a solved problem.

Problem is that nuclear power doesn't solve all our solutions and has a lot of drawbacks of its own - the issue of waste is not a solved problem and will not go away for tens of thousands of years. The other issue is that nuclear sources are limited and nuclear power is fairly expensive. Hydro obviously is the cheapest power source of all, but wind, solar, ect. are all far superior technologies both cost and pollution-wise in the long run; a little pain now is better than a lot of pain for a long time.

We have the technology to do solar TODAY. The idea that we don't is an insane lie spread by the right wing.

The truth is that the best way of running a grid is distributed production, because of line losses. Anyone who tells you otherwise is useless or is trying to sell you something.

Polishing the brass on the Titanic man....it's all going down. Humans are damned by so many things, but if you want to trace it back to a common root, then greed is what you will find. That the author even releases her book on paperback exemplifies this wonderfully, and apparently the sad irony - the energy she made lost through telling us how to save energy - is lost on her.

If she is serious, she will advocate boycotting the paperback and going to the e-book. But then, maybe she is just greedy like the vultures that circle her digital corpse.

Depends on how you interpret the term "crisis". And if you don't think that the US grid is in need of upgrades and a co-ordinated national policy about such upgrades, I'd suggest reading the DoE report "Keeping the Lights On" (which I suspect served as the 'inspiration' for the title of this book as reported in this thinly veiled ad for a friend).

I appreciate, I truly do, the engineering problems behind new energy sources. I can't even honestly say I'm totally well informed about such, and would love to read about how the modern energy grid works. But to be honest, a lot of books like these, and lot of the way people talk about saving the earth, and developing new energy sources, and etc. sounds like idealists and engineers and activists all trying to solve what is, in large part, and problem of economics and business.

When electric cars dominate in a decade, it's not going to because the average person made "hard choices" or because activists protested or lobbied enough, or because we "banded together" as a people to save ourselves. It's going to be because electricity, stored in a battery, is a hell of a lot cheaper than gas in terms of energy per dollar received.

When we get rid of polluting electricity generation it's not going to be because a farmers encouraged others to grow the right crops, or any of the other things I already mentioned. Again, it's going to be because the new, non polluting power plants are cheaper. Because that's the way things work, because people are shortsighted, and selfish, and ignorant, and yet the one thing they can all understand is how much money they're putting into the pump, or they're paying for electricity every month.

And so we don't need a miracle solution, we don't need hard choices. We need companies to hire engineers, to sit down, and make a better battery. And they are, they really are. Battery research is hot as plasma jets off the sun these days, and every car company and their mother is making an electric car. Because they know what's coming, they can see the end of oil clearer than most people can. What will be interesting is seeing what the future of power plants is, and it's not going to be crops.

It is, in fact, pronounced with a soft g sound, as per the rules of English.

ga, go, and gu use hard g, ge and gi (and gy) use soft g.

By the same token, ca, co, and cu use the hard c sound, while ce and ci (and cy) use the soft c sound.

The problem you've described arises because English isn't especially well standardized, being a bastardization of pretty much every language out there. There are some words wherein ge and gi are pronounced with a hard g sound, like get and giddy, but there are far more words, like gel, gem, geriatric, gist, gigantic, gigolo, and so forth, which conform properly to the rule. Most exceptions will be because the root word in question is from a different language than the one the rule came from.

Therefore, both words in "Jumpin' Gigawatts!" are pronounced with the same sound. The Doc is right.

If you have an unfamiliar word and want to be sure the reader pronounces a hard g before an e or i, use gh, such as ghigawatts (which should probably be spelled ghiggawatts to show the i is short anyway).

Record the record, you know? (English is screwy.)

English-shminglish. Every engineer and physicist pronounces "giga" with the g from "get it?". English majors, record this one as an exception to the rule.

Problem is that nuclear power doesn't solve all our solutions and has a lot of drawbacks of its own - the issue of waste is not a solved problem and will not go away for tens of thousands of years.

Sources? This was true. Do you KNOW it to be 100% true today?

Titanium Dragon wrote:

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We have the technology to do solar TODAY. The idea that we don't is an insane lie spread by the right wing.

Who says we are not doing solar today? I just drove by what look to be 3 solar power plants (they had a field of mirrors and a tall tower in the middle) out in the CA desert. If you think we should cover Arizona in nothing but solar, I could agree with you but that is $$$$$$$. What exactly is your plan to raise the $$$$$$?

This argument is beyond stupid. The entire point of the government funding R&D like this is to get jobs in the US producing renewable energy.

Where's your proof that the government is better at this than the free market? That money comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is the free market which would have allocated it differently to create jobs, etc. There's overhead and loss involved in siphoning that money out of the free market and investing it in pet projects. Spain invested heavily in green jobs, and some estimates state that two other jobs were lost in the free market for every "green" job created by their market interference. Given the state of the economy and unemployment, why should we be so wasteful with our limited resources?

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Retards, such as yourself

Why must your kind resort to childish namecalling and ad homs? Frankly, you should get moderated for that. You're most likely not going to, but if you were a "denialist" you surely would. Such incivility has no place in civilized discussion forums.

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The problem is that you have to be insane to believe that climate change isn't occuring.

I know climate change is occurring. Always has been, always will be. Most people who don't buy into climate extremism know that climate change is occurring. Many even know that there's an anthropogenic component to current climate change. But intelligent people can reasonably debate the extent of that anthropogenic component, and even among those who buy into the IPCC's numbers regarding this extent there can be reasonable debate about how best to allocate our limited resources.

It's the climate extremists who are absolutists and irrational. They have a very shortsighted and uncomplicated view of our world and the many pressures it faces in addition to climate change. We are precariously balanced on a razor's edge, and falling away from the advancements we've made toward liberty and equality and greater technology over the past few centuries would be easier than maintaining forward progress, or even stasis. A lot goes on in the world that climate extremists seem to not understand.

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I'm sorry that you are unable to cope with reality.

I seem to know a lot more about reality than you my friend. Take off the blinders and cure your tunnel vision.

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The science has been settled for decades and has been blindingly obvious for a long time, because the greenhouse effect is simple science. You can verify it for yourself if you'd like. Take two plastic containers, fill one of them with pure air, and then spike the other with higher levels of greenhouse gases as represent the future atmospheric composition. Set them out and measure their temperature over time. Which do you think will be warmer? Gee, I wonder. The fact that some gasses trap heat better than others is not controversial and is basic physics.

The fact that the planet and its many sinks and feedbacks and forcings is far more complicated than two plastic containers seems to elude you. Again, which one of us thinking too simplistically? Take off the blinders.

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The only reason this is controversial is the same as with evolution: some folk feel like they have a lot to lose.

Everyone has a lot to lose, my friend. Civilization is a balancing act. A thousand years of progress can be lost in one bad century. Did you know that Roman medicine and surgery were more advanced in 300 C.E. than they would be again anywhere in the West until the 1800s? The same or similar with many other sciences and technologies--1500 years from decline to restoration. We all have a lot to lose by making the wrong choices and allocating our resources poorly.

As many religious fundamentalists as there are in the U.S., do you have any idea how easy it would be for them to come to power for an extended period and do untold damage to our hard-won freedoms and social progress? All it takes is an extended economic downturn. All it takes is to take too many resources from the free market--whether through government spending, carbon taxes/cap-and-trade, whatever, it doesn't matter--and to create one wrong economic crisis. We almost had a fundamentalist lunatic who hates gays, wants to take contraception away from the public, and would certainly do worse to the environment (not to mention international relations) than you can imagine as a major party presidential candidate in this election cycle. That is very significant. You people really are wearing blinders.

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You are a bad person if you are unable to accept reality.

The reality is what I was just warning you about, and it'll happen a lot faster than climate change. That, and climate change, and a lot of other competing concerns. You've been warned, but somehow I doubt you're going to take off those blinders. Climate extremists are single-issue simplistic in a world that's far more complex than even climate itself is.

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Coal will be moved away from if we force it to pay its fair share for the environmental contamination it causes.

And then young man, after you do that and it creates economic hardship for millions as costs and prices increase, they will elect people you really don't like who will take away all your toys and do bad things to you. I'm keeping it as simple as possible, since those climate extremists are used to thinking simplistically.

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Moving water long distances is always going to be a mistake. Its a mistake in LA, it will be a mistake in the future. The correct thing to do is to move the people.

And I suppose we can grow the world's food in cities from rooftop gardens. Nice. The reality is that people move of their own accord as local economies and outlooks change; hence all those ghost towns, and all the plowing-under of old neighborhoods some shrinking cities are undertaking. But even so, getting water across the country will be a very important need in the future if climate projections and water use projections are accurate. We have power grids, why not water grids in parts of the country which would benefit from them?

And again, if you try to force people to change too much too quickly--you'll live to regret it, or at least your children will. We are one economic crisis under the right circumstances away from putting the American Taliban of the social rightists in power. Ready to take those blinders off, folks? Santorum hasn't done it for you yet? And that's just one force out of a great many that we do need to bear in mind when considering policy and its effects. The real world is complicated. Climate extremism is too simple-minded to work in it.

The solution to the crisis is to do something about the science deniers. The science deniers are spending big bucks on misinformation. People are being seduced by smooth liars with lies that sound compelling to an untrained ear.

It's much harder to counter simple, effective lies with the intricacies of reality.

Or maybe the Obama administration could devote more funds to modernizing the grid instead of pouring huge amounts of money into the Solyndra's and Fiskers of the world and into not ready for prime time alternative fuels.

Sure it's not nearly as sexy as OMG solar, wind and bio-fuels but it would probably net more electricity than the others put together.

But since Obama wants to take credit for more visible alternatives and to appease the enviro - weenies it won't happen.

If memory serves, didn't the original stimulus package contain some pretty ambitious grid work before it was hacked apart? And some did make it through.

I've been told by someone who has been to Brazil on numerous occasions that their vehicles already have the ability to switch on-the-fly (i.e. no restart) between ethanol-based, bio fuel-based, and natural gas-based fuels in different tanks. Am I hearing this correctly, and if so why do I hear nothing about it in the US or European media?

I've been told by someone who has been to Brazil on numerous occasions that their vehicles already have the ability to switch on-the-fly (i.e. no restart) between ethanol-based, bio fuel-based, and natural gas-based fuels in different tanks. Am I hearing this correctly, and if so why do I hear nothing about it in the US or European media?

It wouldn't be a difficult engineering problem, it would just not be a very useful feature in the U.S.. We have an excellent infrastructure for and demand for gasoline, and little infrastructure for or demand for the mentioned alternatives. I can't see anyone but the greenest of the green in the U.S. wanting it, much less having to pay extra for it and having to cut down their gasoline tank capacities to make room for other tanks which would for 99+% of people sit empty. Now, I'm guessing Brazilians might find something like that useful though because of the availability of alternative fuels at reasonable price points, because of the ability to purchase whatever's cheapest at whatever time and place, and because infrastructure would likely be spotty in places for some of those fuels so that whatever's locally available would just work.

The reason you don't hear anything about it in the media is pretty much the same reason you don't hear about other infrastructure differences in the media. What works in one place wouldn't be a useful change in another. We don't have or need a universal electric system for instance, yet there's no pressure for Americans to adopt European standards and fixtures.

Natural gas derivatives could provide a reasonable alternative to gasoline in the U.S. automotive sector, but again there's not much demand or infrastructure. Unless there's a plan to build the infrastructure, adding cost to the cars isn't a productive use of resources. Moving commercial trucks and commercial transport over to natural gas would be a solution to get the ball rolling, however, and then use could expand from there.

But personally it seems to me that electricity is the most logical next step for much of the U.S. home automotive sector since it's fuel-agnostic and until the technology and infrastructure for fast charging away from home improves, charging at home would be adequate for many typical commute distances. This will only improve as battery tech and automotive weights improve. Longer distance commutes would have to still be served by gasoline until some sort of charging infrastructure is rolled out, unless natural gas or natural gas/electric hybrids were to prove useful.

The combination of natural gas for trucking and commercial transport and long-distance-commuter home vehicles, and electric for most home vehicles, would seem to be ideal.

Don't forget that if you power your car using corn syrup or sugar-sourced ethanol rather than gasoline, there is still a downside.

In the case of using sugar or corn, or other farm products, the downside is that prices for these commodities tend to go up due to the new source of demand. Great for farmers, not so great for people who already have trouble paying for food.

Cambridge University physicist David MacKay has written a book along similar lines for the UK grid (although the principles he discusses are transferable to any grid). He removes money from the equation throughout the book, considering each energy source/drain on its merits, until the very end when he weighs up lots of different future energy scenarios and the compromises each would make. What's more, for those of you complaining about the price of the Kindle book, his book - Without the Hot Air - is free.

The solution to the crisis is to do something about the science deniers.

Yes, we should round up everyone who doesn't believe that scientists couldn't possibly be biased or inaccurate and put them into special camps.

It doesn't matter if a scientist is biased or whatever else he might be, because the scientific process is designed to deal with that.

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Scientific consensus is never wrong, particularly not among people whose entire field and worldview is built upon something so important that it attracts only people of pure and unclouded ideology.

Indeed, the scientific consensus is rarely wrong. The entire world is built on the scientific consensus (doing things that were made possible by science). You are accepting the scientific consensus as being correct all the time. And again, it doesn't matter what someone's worldview is. There are thousands of climate scientists all over the world. You would have to be quite a character to claim that they are all part of a major conspiracy.

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So many prominent climate scientists are so convinced of their conclusions that they've been showing up to political demonstrations and rallies pretty much forever, and they've been saying for literally decades that the science is completely settled--so they just have to be right.

No, the science has not been completely settled for decades. However, it is settled now. Just like Evolution. Even Evolution has details that are not fully understood, but the overall picture is well known.

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There's zero chance that it's the ideology driving the science, rather than the other way around, because that never happens:

So because science is self-correcting, that is a bad thing? Foot. Gun. Trigger.

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It's a good thing the looming global warming and energy crises are so pressing that we can just ignore all that and devote all of our efforts and resources toward one thing, opportunity costs be damned.

Yes, we should ignore politics and nonsense like that when it comes to determining what's correct and what isn't when it comes to the climate.

You are kind of proving my point: You are only spewing anti-scientific propaganda, and lying and attacking because of your political ideology.

Kyle Niemeyer / Kyle is a science writer for Ars Technica. He is a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University and has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Case Western Reserve University. Kyle's research focuses on combustion modeling.